Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Linguistics in the News and on Jeopardy

This just in from CNN Tech:

According to the article linked to above, an IBM computing system named "Watson" will take on two of Jeopardy's most successful contestants ever in a two day match that will be aired in mid-February next year.

The object of the matches is "to see if a machine can compete in a contest that will require it to interpret real-language questions (or, in "Jeopardy!" parlance, answers), research them and answer quicker than the flesh-and-blood champs."

While I do see how the modelling of human language offered by computational linguists has numerous potential benefits, I'm not sure how I feel about the potential of a large-scale decline in person-to-person communication.


Go Brad Rutter!

Go Ken Jennings!







What do you think? Please share comments below.


For a concise look at computational linguistics, check out this link.

2 comments:

Licia said...

Interesting video on the IBM site: Why Jeopardy!?

Laura Payne said...

Licia - It is indeed. Thank you for sharing.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...